Basu: Texas teen's case shows we have 2 standards of justice

A poor kid would be heading to prison, not probation

Dec. 19, 2013

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Being rich is a burden. There’s a reason that comic book character Richie Rich was dubbed the “poor little rich boy.” You think it’s a picnic being the only child of billionaire parents and having two of everything? How are you supposed to choose between them? And who gets stuck paying the inheritance taxes?

The rich can’t catch a break. They’re given their own reality shows and gossiped about in the tabloids, as icons and amusement for others. But then they’re expected to follow everyone else’s laws like nobodies, and the money people happily take from them at other times isn’t supposed to influence justice.

Except that it did recently in Texas, turning the stuff of parody into a national outrage.

A rich teenager walked away with probation after killing four people and seriously injuring two others while driving drunk. The judge accepted the contention of a defense psychologist that the teen was the victim of “affluenza,” raised with such wealth and entitlement that he never learned from his mistakes and was not responsible for his actions.

At 16, Ethan Couch got drunk on stolen booze — a theft captured on a surveillance camera — mixed it with valium, drove with three times the legal amount of alcohol in his blood (though 16-year-olds can’t legally drink at all) at 30 mph above the speed limit. He slammed into someone whose car had broken down, and others who had come to that person’s aid. One person who wasn’t killed remains paralyzed, unable to speak.

Prosecutors had sought a 20-year prison sentence. But for all of his flagrantly illegal and multiply fatal actions, Couch got away with only 10 years of probation and an order to spend some time — his defense suggested a year or two — at a $450,000-a-year treatment facility. It features “equine therapy” and organic foods and should fit his parents’ $10 million a year budget.

Those are the people who Couch’s lawyer argued never set limits and gave him whatever he wanted. As evidence of Couch’s affliction, the judge was told of a time when, at 15, he was found passed out in a car with a naked 14-year-old girl, but wasn’t punished.

Calls are mounting for removal of the juvenile court judge, Jean Boyd, though there are no allegations of corruption or kickbacks, which might more easily have explained the unfathomable judgment. Money did buy this kid justice, but not because it greased palms or afforded him a top lawyer. Rather, because the judge accepted the myth of the poor little rich kid and used it to perpetuate the privileges that accrue from wealth.

Instead of putting an end to the cycle by imposing a real punishment, her ruling effectively says because wealthy people have gotten away with things before, they should again. Now it becomes a precedent.

It has since been reported that Couch’s parents had misdemeanor run-ins with the law, mostly traffic-related, but they either got them dismissed or paid fines and got off. The mother had five charges and the father has had 22 since 1989.

It’s not that children who break the law don’t deserve second chances. But they need to at least show remorse, and take some responsibility for their actions. Couch never even apologized to the bereaved families at his sentencing. It’s not plausible that spoiled kids don’t fundamentally know right from wrong. There are plenty of other places to learn it, and if nothing else, they know what the law says.

Imagine a public defender for a poor kid trying to get his client off on the grounds that his parent, working multiple jobs, wasn’t around enough to show him right from wrong. In Polk County, the kid would probably have been petitioned to adult court and sent to the slammer for a long time.

And maybe that’s the real point here. If a rich young person can be found not guilty because he never learned responsibility from his parents, wouldn’t a poor one have even more justification because of the circumstances poverty puts one in? Yet we are conditioned to punish and regulate the poor rather than give them the benefit of the doubt. A rich kid’s “affluenza” is a poor kid’s “pathology of poverty.” One gets you off and the other gets you a prison record, with a domino effect on your prospects in life.

Couch did learn something from his parents. He learned that wealth can, indeed, buy extraordinary concessions. It’s not likely that the equine therapy and organic foods will teach him otherwise. But what does the poor kid learn from this ruling? That even in our meritocracy, there are two standards of justice, they don’t favor people like him or her, and they start applying from the moment of birth.